“Can I open it now?”
Jei untied the ribbon and lifted the lid carefully. Inside the open box lay a jumble of Polaroid photographs.
“Photos?”
And not only photos. There was also a small voice recorder, about the size of two fingers laid one across the other.
Jei gathered the scattered photos into a stack first and lifted them out. Twenty or so in all.
She studied them quietly, trying to work out what exactly she was looking at, and then her face twisted like someone who’d just seen something vile.
“What is it?”
Jei handed the photos to Iheon. His face twisted exactly the same way once he’d looked at them.
The first photo showed a woman’s hand, hanging limp down past the edge of a sofa.
Her face was outside the frame, but the thin bracelet around her wrist and the single shoe lying on the floor were perfectly clear.
The second photo caught the same woman from a slightly wider angle.
A few buttons of her rumpled blouse had come undone, and the skirt that should have reached below her knees had been shoved up in disarray to the middle of her thighs.
She didn’t look like someone sleeping. She looked like someone with no strength left to hold herself up and no awareness left to fix her own clothes.
The next photo included a man’s lower body. Suit trousers, glossy shoes, a man sitting right beside her on the sofa.
And at the very edge of the frame, another man’s shoe and trouser cuff had been caught.
The woman in the following photo was someone else. Different clothes, different shoes, a different accessory on her wrist. But the way she sprawled across the sofa, the state of her clothing, were no different from the first woman’s.
On the table sat a glass marked with a lipstick print and a bottle of imported liquor, half empty.
With every photo, the angle and the distance changed.
A shot taken from across the sofa. A shot looking down from right beside her. Even a shot with a phone pushed up close to her face, as if to check whether she’d react at all.
They were photos of unconscious women, taken without a flicker of hesitation.
Except every last one of them was out of focus. Not quite camera shake, not quite light bleed. Something else, something that felt off.
Iheon held one photo up under the dome light. In the part that had looked at first glance like bleeding light, a faint shimmering pattern had been captured as well, like heat haze.
“This one’s a shot of a monitor screen, isn’t it?”
Jei said it, bent over the photos with him.
“They’re not the originals.”
The two of them went through the rest quickly. The screen brightness and the glare varied from shot to shot, but the same grid pattern showed up in all of them.
Partway through, Jei started laying the Polaroids out across the dashboard.
Some showed a deep red sofa and a marble table. Others showed white sheets and a nightstand that looked like a hotel room.
There was a cramped little room papered in tacky floral wallpaper, and there was a high-floor suite with a city night view spread out beyond a wall of glass.
Scene after scene from places just like one another, running in a long line under the windshield.
“Why would anyone take pictures like this?”
Jei asked without bothering to filter her disgust. Iheon looked over the photos spread across the dashboard more carefully.
Judging by the state of the women, slack and boneless, this looked less like simple drunkenness and more like they’d been given something. A drug. GHB, maybe.
The point of a drug would be to head off any inconvenient resistance.
Hotels and club rooms, likewise, would be the ideal places to stay out of other people’s sight.
The photographs, though, were a different matter.
Taking them wasn’t necessary to the crime at all. If anything, it meant accepting the risk of leaving evidence behind.
So why photograph it?
There was only one answer.
“Trophies.”
“Trophies?”
Every woman in those photos was unconscious. Of course they’d had no idea what was being done to them.
“What the man filming wanted to keep was the moment he had total control over a woman who couldn’t resist him in any way.”
Iheon’s voice dropped, rough at the edges.
“He’d pull it out whenever he felt like looking, and chew over the time he could do whatever he wanted with them. Or show it off to somebody.”
“That’s horrifying. If I thought there was footage of me floating around somewhere and I didn’t even know it existed, I think I’d want to die.”
She couldn’t swallow her anger, and her breath came out in a fine tremble.
What Muerte had given them were only photos of parts of a body, but the footage would be far more naked than that. As a woman, there was no way to feel anything but fury at a crime like this.
“Who on earth is he? The piece of shit who did this?”
“Finding out what kind of piece of shit he is starts now.”
Iheon picked the recorder out of the box. The recorder was the only thing left to check.
“At least one thing’s clear now. Why Muerte picked this devil.”
A devil who built his house upon someone’s misfortune, drank someone’s tears as wine, and grew fat selling someone’s shame.
Only now did the words in that email find their full meaning.
Iheon pressed play on the recorder in his hand.
...
At first there was nothing at all. Then a faint hiss of static, and ragged breathing that grew clearer by degrees.
Hhuk. Hhhuuk.
The breathing, presumably a man’s, was harsh and irregular. His mouth must have been gagged, because all that escaped were crushed sobs mashed flat inside his throat, intermittent. Underneath it ran a creaking, as though he were strapped to something.
A moment later came a mechanical voice, impossible to pin to a man or a woman.
First devil.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is wicked, your whole body will be full of darkness.
The instant the mechanical voice started, the man thrashed harder. Chair legs hammered the floor again and again, and something like an animal’s howl leaked out from the back of his throat.
Your eye held no light.
The desperate moaning climbed higher and higher. The scream trapped inside his mouth never became words, only tangled with his ragged breath.
You coveted what must not be looked upon, you recorded a disgrace that must not be left behind, and you set it before countless eyes.
A click. Metal catching on metal.
And if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and cast it away.
After a brief silence, the man’s scream tore loose. A howl that couldn’t come out whole, stopped up by whatever filled his mouth.
The shriek, crushed flat inside his throat, rang dull through the recorder. The chair rocked as if it would tip over, and then came the sound of feet kicking wildly at the floor, over and over.
At that grotesque, horrible screaming, Jei clenched the hands resting on her knees and bowed her head low.
She didn’t have to see it to know exactly what was being done.
The screaming went on and on, then cut off for a moment, leaving only panting. The mechanical voice came again.
Devil.
One darkness yet remains to you.
There was a convulsive thrashing, as though the man were writhing against his bonds, and then the recording simply stopped.
Back home, the two of them decided the first order of business was washing the dust and sweat off their bodies. The damp, moldering stench of that basement bar seemed to have soaked into their noses.
Jei took the bathroom off the master bedroom, so Iheon used the one by the study.
He unbuttoned his black shirt and pulled it back off his shoulders, and dust he hadn’t realized was clinging to it rose in a pale cloud.
He stripped off his trousers, then his underwear, laid them on the counter, and finally took off his glasses before stepping into the shower stall.
He turned the tap, and cold water poured over the crown of his head, then ran down his nape and the line of his spine to patter onto the floor.
As the chill water rinsed the stickiness away, the muscles knotted tight across his body loosened by degrees.
Once he was more or less soaked through, Iheon tilted his face up into the stream. Eyes shut, pushing his hair back off his forehead, he went over the day again.
Metal scraping the floor. Breath crushed down inside a throat.
The scream that finally burst out when the man could bear no more.
And the distorted, mechanical voice that picked up every time, as if it had been waiting for all those sounds to die down.
The dust washed away. The sounds lodged in his ears didn’t.
That voice above all. The intonation without a single grain of feeling in it made his skin crawl.
Iheon, standing under water cold enough to scour his head clear, slowly opened his eyes.
The ragged breathing, the chair grinding against the floor, the scream forcing its way up through a blocked throat: that alone was enough to picture the torture the man had been put through.
「For the wages of sin is death.」
If the email meant what it said, then the man was almost certainly dead.
When the hard rush of water stopped, the bathroom fell silent in an instant.
Iheon toweled himself dry and changed. He shook out his wet hair, raked it back roughly, and stepped out.
His steps slowed as he came down the hall and into the living room.
Jei had finished washing first and was sitting at the island counter, her long hair hanging damp over her summer pajamas.
